While I stand by my assertion that the
petition to the Department of Justice was pretty dumb (because the coins they grabbed are definitely gone for good and the DoJ think you're all criminals anyway), I'm pleased to see users of BTC-e haven't lost
all their funds to the US government. Consider yourselves lucky it was only about half. You could just as easily have lost it all. Learn from this and only hold sums on exchanges that you would deem "
acceptable losses" if the same were to happen again in future. Because that's a real possibility with any exchange, particularly when fiat-handling exchanges are moving ever closer to the regulatory spotlight.
People often make the argument that exchanges are not banks, which is true enough. But there is one important similarity in most legal jurisdictions around the world. Once you deposit your funds with either a bank or an exchange, your legal custody of those funds ends. They don't belong to you anymore. You are giving ownership of those funds to that bank or exchange. Banks become the owner of your fiat deposits because that's what the law says. Exchanges become the owner of your bitcoin deposits because they hold the private keys and you don't. Your legal status is that of a creditor. That means, by using an exchange to store your funds, you are willfully returning to the realm of IOUs which crypto was specifically designed to relegate. That's not how this is supposed to work.
Bitcoin is considered trustless and secure because it doesn't rely on a third party to make it work. If you freely choose to introduce a third party to the equation by asking them to look after your funds, you are weakening your own security.
Think twice about who you give your money to. Can they be trusted with it? Increasingly, it seems the answer to that question is a resounding "
NO".
